


Black coffee, I'm your coffee guy

by Frog_that_writes



Series: if the universe is infinite, then it's definite, that there's an au where paul is the latte hottay [1]
Category: Hatchetfield Universe - Team StarKid
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Apotheosis, F/M, Role Reversal, author googled shit about running businesses and also how coffee shops work, brief non graphic description of gried, but is still mostly unclear on both fronts, idk what other tags to add lmao, im literally 16, implied child abuse in emma's past but nothing graphic, not even really implied like u have to squint tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28448877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frog_that_writes/pseuds/Frog_that_writes
Summary: Emma Perkins finds herself back in Hatchetfield, trying to cope with the death of her sister and the fact that she's now apparently the owner of the family business she never wanted to be a part of.Paul Mathews is just trying to save up enough money to leave his awful job at Beanies.Their paths cross and, well, it's pretty straight forward from there.
Relationships: Paul Matthews/Emma Perkins
Series: if the universe is infinite, then it's definite, that there's an au where paul is the latte hottay [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2083836
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	Black coffee, I'm your coffee guy

Emma stifled a sigh as she glared at the screen in front of her, displaying a spreadsheet with numbers that were becoming harder and harder to read the longer she refused her body’s call for sleep. She knew it was irrational, seeing as how it was an inanimate object and all, but she swore it glared back. 

It had been a hard few weeks. 

She still remembered the way she felt when she got the call. How her legs had buckled under her, all the air getting sucked from her lungs with a single sentence. 

_ “There was an accident, and I’m afraid your sister didn’t make it.” _

What are you even supposed to do when that happens? 

If “you” happens to mean Emma Perkins, than apparently you hop on the next flight to Clivesdale (ugh) and take the ferry ride to Hatchetfield before you’ve even had time to think about how fucking insane what you’re doing is. 

Tom had been pissed when she showed up, their address having been gleaned from the years of Christmas cards and invitations with return addresses. His eyes had been red rimmed when he told her to fuck off, and the small figure behind him, bearing Jane’s big brown eyes with tear tracks drying on his face, had looked at the whole scene with confusion.

_ He didn’t even know who she was.  _

It sounded awful, but that somehow hurt worse than the phone call had. Her sister was dead, her nephew didn’t recognize her, and her brother in law hated her. She had just spent all the money she had on flying across the continent and everything was going to shit. 

And then, inexplicably, Tom had softened, and mumbled something about a guest room as he wandered away, door wide open behind him. 

And that’s the story of how she avoided sleeping on the streets. 

It wasn’t long before the business got brought up after that. There was a haze of guilt and grief over everything, and every conversation was hushed so they could pretend the nine year old who just lost his mom wasn’t listening to every word. 

Tom confessed Jane had resented inheriting it. Emma scoffed and told him to tell her something she didn’t know. 

She remembered days as kids when the bags under Jane’s eyes would grow heavy. How she would flinch whenever their parents called her name, some new form to show her. She remembers how Jane was top of her class and still managed to spend all her free time sitting in on meetings or hunched over tax returns or whatever the fuck it is she did. She remembers how she never made it any easier on her sister, how all her rage at her parents never having a moment to spare for her somehow got turned on Jane. She was so goddamn  _ selfish.  _ As an adult she can see that the whole situation was fucked up. It pains her to think that she was like her parents when it came to hurting Jane. 

And now they’re all dead. She’s the only Perkins left. Her parents would absolutely hate this. Their business, their pride and joy, being left to their least favorite daughter and their good-for-nothing son in law. 

It was almost enough to make her smile. Almost. 

Tom had helped Jane some, after he got back from overseas. He never had a mind for numbers, though, and quickly found his own job at the highschool as a shop teacher. He liked it there, he told her. The small, finicky bits of a business… spreadsheets and tax returns and  _ talking to people,  _ god forbid, were not his strong suits. Teaching sixteen year olds angry at the world how to use a saw? That was something he could do.

But Emma had spent her whole life resenting the idea that apparently she was too dumb to learn all of that. Logic dictated that she didn’t have to prove herself, but she wanted to prove herself  _ so bad.  _ She may have never gotten all of this drilled into her head like Jane did, but she grew up with her. She picked up some of it, at least. And besides, her dream of owning a pot farm wasn’t entirely a far fetched vague illusion. She had learned some things that would prove useful. 

And maybe this wasn’t what she was planning on doing, but when had she ever planned anything? She may have had  _ ideas _ for her farm, but that’s all they were- ideas. She didn’t have a license to grow marijuana or land or any of the shit she actually needed. All she was doing was wasting her life away backpacking across Central America, telling herself that she’ll wait a couple more weeks before she started doing the nitty gritty of it all. 

But she didn’t have time to procrastinate on this. Tom only got so much bereavement leave. She saw it in his eyes, how much he felt like he had no idea what to do. He loved kids. He loved his job. But he loved his wife, and to sell her company as soon as she died seemed wrong, in some way. Even if she hadn’t always wanted her position, she still put in the work and the effort to make it  _ her’s  _ and not their parent’s. How could he just sell that to some competitor and be done with that? How could he justify the layoffs of all the people his wife would gush happily about, leaving him to hear about all the office drama and pregnancy announcements. 

But how could he justify up and leaving from the school, knowing those kids looked up to him?

So Emma knew what she had to do. She told him she would handle it. He would need to help her for a few months as she got her shit together, but she would be in charge of it all. He got to keep his job as a teacher and could spend his grief in peace with his son and she got to watch the way his opinion changed about her. How she went from an annoying sister-in-law who had never been a part of his life to a godsend helping him when he needed her most. 

And all it was costing her was her sanity and any memory of a time in her life when she could sleep. 

She rubbed her eyes again, waiting for the screen to come into focus. It didn’t. Well, she thought, glancing at the clock, looks like it’s about time for a coffee break in that case. 

She shut the laptop in front of her, not bothering to close her tabs or shut it down. She shuffled the paper scattered in front of a little too, for good measure. There, now she had a neat stack of disorganized forms. Perfect. 

“I’m taking my break,” she half shouted to the office across from her’s. She didn’t get an answer back, but that was to be expected. She and Tom did very little talking now that they had fallen into a rough routine. Truthfully, he preferred to send her an email with any necessary information he managed to find while going through Jane’s old filing cabinets and files. It wasn’t like her sister had been exactly  _ secretive  _ about her business, but there were certain things she didn’t spread around the office that needed to be unearthed through hours upon hours of talking to the head of every department and combing through files. Half-baked plans for expansion, new clients she had been hoping to nab, which branches needed a raise, and other shit falling under the general category of “things that have taken over the life of one Emma Perkins.”

Her feet knew the steps to the Starbucks down the road well, at this point. Hatchetfield had changed both unbelievably and not at all in the decade or so she’d been gone. Downtown got worse, uptown got more gentrified and hipster, and it all was a little tragically nostalgic. The pavement was cracked in the same spots it had been twenty years ago, when she was a little girl getting yelled at by her mother to hurry along as she stopped to jump over all the imperfections in the concrete. She couldn’t be sure, but the chain link fence outside the school’s football field even seemed to be the exact same one she had peered through as a teen, not wanting to be one of the kids who actually went to the games but not wanting to stay home either. 

She remembered when her sister would spot her, waving as she took a break in the middle of cheers. She remembers not waving back. 

A lump rises to her throat. She shakes her head and continues the trek to Starbucks.

When she gets there it’s to find the young worker she easily recognized from frequent trips closing the door behind her, flipping the sign from “open” to “closed.” 

“What’s going on?” She asked, frowning in confusion. It was way too early in the day for them to be closing, and they didn’t have any signs up on her past few visits indicating some sort of scheduled closing. The barista cringed slightly. 

“We’re having some utility issues,” she said delicately. “There’s a septic problem.”

“Oh,” Emma said, wrinkling her nose. “Gross.”

“Exactly,” the girl laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“It’s fine,” she waved. For a brief moment she considered asking if she knew of anywhere else she could get coffee, but it seemed kinda rude, and the girl seemed antsy to get on her way. Emma wasn’t going to begrudge her the impromptu time off. Instead, she pulled out her phone, deciding google maps would have to do. 

As luck would have it, there was a coffee shop just a little further down the street, a small looking place named  _ Beanies,  _ boasting a 3.5 star rating. Frankly, as long as their coffee was hot and she could put enough sugar in it that her teeth hurt, she didn’t really care if their pastries were stale. 

She was beginning to regret that decision as she opened the door and the chime of the bell was covered up by an off-key voice singing some horribly contrived lyrics about coffee as a man dropped a hand full of change into the tip jar. The man singing looked like every word was as painful as pulling teeth, and was clearly trying to hide a glare.

“Aw can’t you do better than that?” The tipper drawled, his condescending tone dripping from every word. 

_ Oh, fuck this dude,  _ Emma thought as she bodily shoved past him.

“If you don’t mind, some of us are actually here to get coffee, imagine that,” she snarked. The man started to say something, but Emma decided the best course of action would probably just be to continue talking over him. Loudly. “How many shots of espresso can you legally put in a large americano?”

“Oh-” He stuttered, clearly taken off guard by the chaos of the last six seconds. “Well a large would already have two shots in it. I- I don’t think I can legally add more.”

“Okay but can you physically stop me if I also order an espresso and then dumb it into my coffee?” The asshole finally walked off at this point, grumbling unhappily under his breath as walked out the door with his complicated-looking order. 

“No?” He said, brow furrowed in confusion. “If it means that much I’ll just give you the extra shot, just don’t tell my boss.”

“My lips are sealed,” she promised, amused that the man had so quickly given in. He seemed like a nervous wreck, so she was a little proud of how quickly she dragged him to the dark side. 

“So,” he stared, tapping his fists together as the machine slowly spit out her coffee. “I’ve, uh, never seen you around before, I don’t think. And Hatchetfield is a pretty small town, so…” he trailed off as he went through the steps of preparing her order. 

“I grew up here, but I havent been around for the last decade,” Emma explained, not sure why she was bothering. The guy was probably just making polite conversation. Then, a thought occurred to her. “Hey, what was up with that singing when I came in?”

“Oh,” he grimaced. “ _ That.” _

“Oh man, did I hit a nerve?” She joked. He looked like she just spat on him or something, for all the disgust on his face. 

“Again, this conversation can’t reach my boss.” He slid her drink across to her. “He and his wife went on a date to Coldstone and apparently she just  _ loved  _ the whole singing shtick, and he decided to bring it back. Now we have to sing every time someone so much as opens the door or- as you saw, leaves a tip. Thanks for that, by the way. That guy comes in here every day and acts like it’s his god-given right to hear minimum wage workers sing about coffee.” He took a deep breath. “Anyways, coffees on the house, I’m going to cherise that look at his face for the rest of my life.”

“Shit, thanks man,” she said, about to pocket the money she had been preparing to hand over to pay for her drink, before she felt a little guilty. She couldn’t just let this random stranger who clearly hated his job pay for her overpriced coffee. She dumped the waded bills into the tip jar instead, and laughed at the look that crossed his face. 

“Don’t worry,” she assured. “No singing necessary. Or sharing, for that matter. I don’t give a shit about your coworkers, that’s for breaking the law and giving me extra espresso.” She sipped her drink to emphasize her point. 

“Thanks….” he trailed off.

“Emma,” she finished for him. 

“Emma,” he smiled. “Nice to meet you, I’m Paul.” 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> plz comment and kudo is u enjoyed!!  
> idk why this au sparked this in me lmao. hope u enjoyed regardless  
> if u have any thing you would like to see from this au, plz lmk!! u can come chat with me @dndstan on twitter if u want :))


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